Top 10 best annie dillard books 2024
Finding the best annie dillard books suitable for your needs isnt easy. With hundreds of choices can distract you. Knowing whats bad and whats good can be something of a minefield. In this article, weve done the hard work for you.
Best annie dillard books
1. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)
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Harper PerennialDescription
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is the story of a dramatic year in Virginia's Roanoke Valley. Annie Dillard sets out to see what she can see. What she sees are astonishing incidents of "beauty tangled in a rapture with violence."
Her personal narrative highlights one year's exploration on foot in the Virginia region through which Tinker Creek runs. In the summer, Dillard stalks muskrats in the creek and contemplates wave mechanics; in the fall, she watches a monarch butterfly migration and dreams of Arctic caribou. She tries to con a coot; she collects pond water and examines it under a microscope. She unties a snake skin, witnesses a flood, and plays King of the Meadow with a field of grasshoppers. The result is an exhilarating tale of nature and its seasons.
2. Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
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Here, in this compelling assembly of writings, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard explores the world of natural facts and human meanings.3. For the Time Being
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ASIN: 0375703470Description
National Bestseller"Beautifully written and delightfully strange...as earthy as it is sublime...in the truest sense, an eye-opener." --Daily News
From Annie Dillard, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and one of the most compelling writers of our time, comes For the Time Being, her most profound narrative to date. With her keen eye, penchant for paradox, and yearning for truth, Dillard renews our ability to discover wonder in life's smallest--and often darkest--corners.
Why do we exist? Where did we come from? How can one person matter? Dillard searches for answers in a powerful array of images: pictures of bird-headed dwarfs in the standard reference of human birth defects; ten thousand terra-cotta figures fashioned for a Chinese emperor in place of the human court that might have followed him into death; the paleontologist and theologian Teilhard de Chardin crossing the Gobi Desert; the dizzying variety of clouds. Vivid, eloquent, haunting, For the Time Being evokes no less than the terrifying grandeur of all that remains tantalizingly and troublingly beyond our understanding.
"Stimulating, humbling, original--. [Dillard] illuminate[s] the human perspective of the world, past, present and future, and the individual's relatively inconsequential but ever so unique place in it."--Rocky Mountain News
4. An American Childhood
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Harper PerennialDescription
A book that instantly captured the hearts of readers across the country,An American Childhoodis Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard's poignant, vivid memoir of growing up in Pittsburgh in the 1950s.5. The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New
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Ecco PressDescription
A landmark collection of prose from pulitzer prize winner annie dillard, including her most beloved pieces and some rarely seen work
The Abundance includes the best of Annie Dillards essays, delivered in her fierce and muscular prose. Intense, vivid, and fearless, her work endows the true and seemingly ordinary aspects of life with beauty and irony. These essays invite readers into sweeping landscapes, to join her in exploring the complexities of time and death, often with wry humor. On one page, an eagle falls from the sky with a weasel attached to its throat; on another, a man walks into a bar.
Marking the vigor of this powerful writer, The Abundance highlights Annie Dillards elegance of mind.
6. The Writing Life
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Harper PerennialDescription
In this collection of short essays, Annie Dillardthe author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and An American Childhoodilluminates the dedication, absurdity, and daring that characterize the existence of a writer. A moving account of Dillards own experience, The Writing Life offers deep insight into one of the most mysterious professions.
7. The Living: A Novel
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Pacific Northwest during the last decades of the 19th century.Description
This New York Times bestselling novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard is a mesmerizing evocation of life in the Pacific Northwest during the last decades of the 19th century.
8. Three by Annie Dillard: The Writing Life, An American Childhood, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
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A stunning collection of Annie Dillard's most popular books in one volume.9. The Maytrees: A Novel
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Brilliant. . . . A shimmering meditation on the ebb and flow of love.New York Times
In her elegant, sophisticated prose, Dillard tells a tale of intimacy, loss and extraordinary friendship and maturity against a background of nature in its glorious color and caprice. The Maytrees is an intelligent, exquisite novel. The Washington Times
Toby Maytree first sees Lou Bigelow on her bicycle in postwar Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her laughter and loveliness catch his breath. Maytree is a Provincetown native, an educated poet of thirty. As he courts Lou, just out of college, her stillness draws him. Hands-off, he hides his serious wooing, and idly shows her his poems.
In spare, elegant prose, Dillard traces the Maytrees' decades of loving and longing. They live cheaply among the nonconformist artists and writers that the bare tip of Cape Cod attracts. When their son Petie appears, their innocent Bohemian friend Deary helps care for him. But years later it is Deary who causes the town to talk.
In this moving novel, Dillard intimately depicts willed bonds of loyalty, friendship, and abiding love. She presents nature's vastness and nearness. Warm and hopeful, The Maytrees is the surprising capstone of Dillard's original body of work.
10. Holy the Firm
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GodNature
Creation
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In 1975 Annie Dillard took up residence on an island in Puget Sound in a wooded room furnished with "one enormous window, one cat, one spider and one person." For the next two years she asked herself questions about time, reality, sacrifice death, and the will of God. In Holy the Firm she writes about a moth consumed in a candle flame, about a seven-year-old girl burned in an airplane accident, about a baptism on a cold beach. But behind the moving curtain of what she calls "the hard things -- rock mountain and salt sea," she sees, sometimes far off and sometimes as close by as a veil or air, the power play of holy fire.
This is a profound book about the natural world -- both its beauty and its cruelty -- the Pulitzer Prize-winning Dillard knows so well.
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